Paolo and Vittorio Taviani

[ozukarodzi]

I recently had a chance to watch three films by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani brothers and tried to research more information on then, I was surprised by how little resources have been published on them. I hope this post will start a discussion on these two great filmmakers.

San Michele aveva un gallo (1972)

Based on Leo Tolstoy’s short story, the film opens with a group of radical anarchist taking over a town square only to be killed and captured. Their leader, Giulio finds himself imprisoned in solitary confinement for 10 years. When he is transferred to group imprisonment and finally meets contemporary political prisoners, they have nothing but disdain for his beliefs. The film is perhaps the complete opposite of Bresson’s A Man Escaped in terms of using psychology, flashback and fantasy as a tool to show the solidarity of Giulio in prison. Never the less, the spirituality in the film is resemblance in cinema to that of Robert Bresson and Dreyer., in literature to that of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Padre Padrone (1977)

Great film about Childhood and growing up in the remote Sardinian region of Italy. The tradition of using no-actors and actual location never being greater. In a way the film most resemble Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1979).

The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982)
Perhaps the best of the three. Among the most brutal film I have ever seem about WWII and its aftermath, told from the side of the peasants and the farmers. The film was written with collaboration of Tonino Guerra.

There many strange combination of elements that define the cinema of the Taviani brothers. The use of flashback, sudden burst of music that is used as an independent character in the film, use of inner voice-over monologue that usually shows the protagonist’s past experience, future hopes or a mere wish fulfillment, and then there are those inner voice-over monologue of complete stranger that usually comments on certain scenes. Perhaps among all the radical style, is the use of fantasy; a good example is the little girl’s fantasy in The Night of the Shooting Stars, in which the fascist soldier is speared to death by the farmers dressed in full Roman armors.

[Yojimbo]

Loved the ending to "San Michele aveva un gallo", especially: loved the film too, but that ending was just perfect.

I prefer the earthier tones of 'Padre Padrone' to 'Shooting Stars', which is wonderful also, but perhaps just a little slicker for my taste.

I'd also recommend their portmanteau films, based on the writings of Pirandello: Tu Ridi, which I prefer is shorter.
Kaos was made for Italian TV, which perhaps explains why some of the stories overstayed their welcome and could have done with some editing
(But both feature much gorgeous imagery, and wonderful scenes and performances)

[MichaelB]

I'm just researching a piece on Allonsanfàn for Sight & Sound's 'Lost and Found' column (which champions unfairly neglected films), and to my delight I discovered that quite a few Taviani films from their first decade have appeared on DVD in Italy and Spain - invariably without subtitles, but I managed to find .srt files online for Subversives (Sovversivi, 1967), St Michael Had a Rooster (San Michele aveva un gallo, 1971) and Allonsanfàn itself. Their feature debut, Un uomo da bruciare, is also out, but I couldn't find any subtitles - as well as a handful of 1990s/2000s films that seem to have bypassed distribution in English-speaking countries, which I intend to investigate later.

I watched Subversives and St Michael Had a Rooster back to back earlier this week (in both cases for the first time, though I know the Tavianis' 1974-93 output well), and they made a very effective pairing - in fact, both these films and Allonsanfàn are dominated by the theme of would-be revolutionaries finding themselves stymied by a general lack of interest amongst the people they're claiming to fight for. Subversives interweaves four separate stories, linked only by the fact that their protagonists are all attending the funeral of former Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti. I assumed when the film started that I'd have to break off to do a bit of digging into his career, but in actual fact prior knowledge turned out not to be necessary - all the information you need is in the film itself. Essentially, all the film's characters have an often awkward and compromised relationship with left-wing ideals that's laid bare by Togliatti's death: a filmmaker is struggling with his art and his personal health, a talkative philosophy graduate prefers to play childish word games instead of exploring the implications of his ideas, the wife of a Communist dignitary begins a lesbian affair, and a Venezuelan activist contemplates abandoning his Italian wife to return home to start the glorious revolution. It's hard not to think of the events of 1968 when watching it, though the film came out the year before.

I suspect I could have made a fair stab at guessing the directors of Subversives without prior knowledge, but there'd be no doubt whatsoever about St Michael Had a Rooster, which is a Taviani film through and through, starting with their fondness for timeless landscapes and buildings as backdrops for often futile and insignificant human activity. It divides almost perfectly into three acts: in the first, would-be revolutionary Giulio Manieri (Giulio Brogi, who played Héctor the Venezuelan in the earlier film) attempts an almost pitifully inadequate coup seemingly more out of a desire to get his ideas heard than for any other reason; in the second, he whiles away a ten-year prison sentence by constructing a rich fantasy world (each identical prison meal is described as though it was a different delicacy; he holds political debates with his former colleagues while playing all the parts himself); in the third, he emerges to find that he's regarded not merely as yesterday's man but as someone who actively held back the cause of the peasants that he claimed to represent. Each third has its own memorable setting: a town square mostly framed in long shot, a prison cell and the boats traversing the swamps carrying prisoners, all of whom turn out to have altogether more pragmatic ideals than Manieri's firebrand romanticism. I don't think this has ever been shown in my native Britain (certainly not outside one-off festivals), but it's very much our loss: for me, it ranks with their very best films.

[rohmerin]

I have jut receipt from German amazon my favourite film of them: il prato (Die wiese) by ARTHAUS, much cheaper than the Spanish FNAC edition and includes, wow, a 50 minutes interview with the Brothers about this masterpiece. The A.Ratio is ok, 1:85 but in letetrbox !!!

I've ordered at El corte inglés Tu ridi and San Michele aveva un gallo because they are 35 % off + 10 % in their money.

This Spanish book is one of the most beautiful books about cinema that I own. Interview with the author.

In London, I found another book about the brothers in English, but it's not so good as the Spanish one.

[MichaelB]

I'm just researching a piece on Allonsanfàn for Sight & Sound's 'Lost and Found' column (which champions unfairly neglected films)

...which was duly published in the print version a month or so ago, and they've just reproduced it on their website.

[colinr0380]

That was a fascinating article on the early films. Allonsanfàn sounds amazing and it would be interesting to hear more of a perspective of where it fits in with Mastrioanni's career as well. I'm afraid the Taviani brothers are one of my (many) knowledge gaps outside of the obvious Padre Padrone and Night of Shooting Stars (I also have an extremely hazy memory of a television screening of Good Morning, Babylon, which obviously needs refreshing!)

I was wondering whether you knew if the lack of distribution for the later films could be put down totally to the poor reception of Fiorile, as seems to be suggested in the article, or due to vagaries of distributors, or based on other factors? It seems very strange that films with such promising sounding international casts at the very least (e.g. Elective Affinities with Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Huges Anglade or The Lark Farm with Paz Vega, Moritz Bleibtreu, Arsinée Khanjian and Tchéky Karyo) could not receive even a limited UK release (too political?), though it looks as if Fox Lorber had released the former and Image the latter on DVD in the US.

[MichaelB]

The Tavianis were only really big with British arthouse audiences in the early-to-mid 1980s, thanks primarily to The Night of the Shooting Stars and Kaos - the latter ran for over a year at the Academy Cinema, and they were far and away the Taviani films that we showed most often when I worked in rep in the early 1990s. But I don't think Good Morning Babylon, Night Sun and Fiorile made much of a box-office impact, so it's not hard to see why distributors passed on Elective Affinities, especially as the arthouse market had become much more challenging by the mid-90s.

Perhaps equally relevantly, interest in Italian cinema had almost entirely fizzled out by then - most of the big names had died or retired, and although there was some interest in Giuseppe Tornatore (especially Cinema Paradiso) and Nanni Moretti, Pedro Almodóvar had almost single-handedly swivelled the spotlight in the direction of Spanish cinema, and the resulting flurry of interest in people like Julio Medem and Bigas Luna and individual Spanish hits like The Fencing Master (which starred the Tavianis' favourite actor Omero Antonutti, and which I remember being enormously entertaining) pretty much crowded out their Italian counterparts.

Incidentally, I now have Elective Affinities and The Lark Farm on DVD, and will watch them when I get a moment. I also have the two early features that they made with Valentino Orsini, but the DVDs don't have any subtitles at all - I can cope with written Italian if that's the only option, but I've always been terrible at following the spoken variety, especially in films that have a lot of regional dialect.

[GaryC]

I remember Kaos being shown on BBC2 while it was still playing at the Academy Cinema.

[MichaelB]

I'm reviving this thread to flag up that the Tavianis (both now in their eighties) have just won the Golden Bear at Berlin for their latest film, Caesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire). Which means that there's a racing certainty that a Taviani Brothers film will finally get UK cinema distribution for the first time in nearly twenty years.

Completely coincidentally, I'd already ordered a fresh batch of DVDs from Italy, which should arrive any day now - Under the Sign of Scorpio, Resurrection and Luisa Sanfelice all came out last year, after I'd made the posts above. So it now seems that the vast majority of their output is available somewhere (mainly Italy), even if a fair amount of it comes with a language barrier. I found English .srt subtitles to accompany my DVDs of Subversives, St Michael Had a Rooster, Allonsanfàn, Elective Affinities and The Lark Farm, and a French .srt set to accompany Resurrection, but my copies of A Man for Burning, Matrimonial Outlaws, Under the Sign of Scorpio and Luisa Sanfelice are firmly monolingual, and the first two definitely don't even have Italian subtitles.

Handily, my copy of Lorenzo Cuccu's The Cinema of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani comes with detailed synopses for everything bar the too-recent Luisa Sanfelice, so I won't be completely in the dark.

[rohmerin]

and US release by Adopt Films

Trailer on their Cineuropa page